The backlash against the new Adam Curtis is weird. I've seen everything from "He's a neocon" to "It doesn't make sense." He's arguing that ruling classes throughout the world have more in common than with each other than their people and they share tactics to break solidarity.

He points to individual revolutionaries or movements (Afeni Shkaur, Michael X, RAF, Jiang Qing) to show how power co-opted their spirit to transform/mutate. Michael X becomes disillusioned when the children of his oppressors adopt his language and create a new form of control.

The primary mode through which power achieves this is individualism. Through many of his docs, he points to how the political revolutions of the 60s collapsed into cultural revolutions of the 70s, thereby destroying solidarity and atomising people further.

The ruling classes will often share ideas when they work. In Century of the Self, he highlights how New Labour essentially stole large chunks of Bill Clinton's policy platform, up to and including the demonization of the welfare state through individualist rhetoric.

Here, the focus is on conspiracy theories. Kerry Thornley is a product of an individualist culture, attending Robert LeFevre's proto-libertarian Freedom School. He jokingly creates conspiracy theories that reflect fears of collectivism, chiefly the Illuminati.

Curtis points to how the ruling classes in America and Russia, among others, have co-opted conspiract theories to promote their own: QAnon and Russiagate. He doesn't say all conspiracies are fake, however, and references MKUltra as a real example.

His point is that dreams of changing the world are highly individualistic in nature and driven by personal ego, which them easily exploited. Tupac Shakur's dream of reviving the Black Panthers turns him into a cult of personality.

This doesn't mean solidarity isn't achievable. Afeni Shakur, Tupac's mother, beats an FBI entrapment because the Black Panthers' collective works and ideas are so powerful that an FBI mole admits in court he believed they were doing good work.

Conversely, there has been a rise in nationalist movements over the last two decades via figures like Trump and Putin. They exploit our need to find a meaning outside of (and greater than) ourselves. Solidarity can be good or bad, it depends on who holds power.

So he's arguing that power is mutating again to account for growing collectivist movements. But this presents an opportunity, as with Afeni Shakur, because power has not yet fully forced modern political movements to transition into cultural ones (though this is coming).